Transgenic plants with enhanced traits such as improved yield, environmental stress tolerance, pest resistance, herbicide tolerance, modified seed compositions, and the like are desired by both farmers and consumers. Although considerable efforts in plant breeding have provided significant gains in desired traits, the ability to introduce specific DNA into plant genomes provides further opportunities for generation of plants with improved and/or unique traits. The ability to develop transgenic plants with improved traits depends in part on the identification of useful recombinant DNA for production of transformed plants with improved properties, e.g. by actually selecting a transgenic plant from a screen for such improved property. An object of this invention is to provide transgenic plant cell nuclei, plant cells, plants and seeds by screening transgenic crop plants for one of more enhanced agronomic traits where the nucleus in cells of the plant or seed has recombinant DNA that was identified as imparting an improved trait in a model plant, e.g. Arabidopsis thaliana. In some cases the model plant may exhibit an improved trait that corresponds to an enhanced agronomic trait, e.g. cold stress tolerance, water deficit stress tolerance, low nitrogen stress tolerance and the like. In other cases the model plant may exhibit an improved trait that is a surrogate to an enhanced agronomic trait, e.g. salinity stress tolerance being a surrogate to drought tolerance or improvement in plant growth and development being a surrogate to enhanced yield. A further object of the invention is to provide screening methods requiring routine experimentation by which such transgenic plant cell nuclei, cells, plants and seeds can be identified by making a reasonable number of transgenic events and engaging in screening identified in this specification and illustrated in the examples.